OREPA NEWS JUNE 2016 AUGUST EVENTS IN ITH OAK RIDGE G W IN L B M A G E R U T U F A TRILLION E UPF DOLLARS FOR T H BOMB PLANT NUCLEAR GETS THE WEAPONS? GREENLIGHT UPF Bomb Plant gets the green light E veryone knows what nuclear weapons did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fewer people know the devastation wrought by our bombs and warheads on the people and communities that manufacture them. The government’s policy has always been to withhold information, then to deny charges, then to begrudgingly take steps to redress griev- ances, usually only when there is a lawsuit pointed at them. That may be changing—a new doc- ument released in Oak Ridge declares for the first time, before the fact, that it is placing workers and the public in significant danger as it manufactures thermonuclear cores for warheads at the Y-12 nuclear weapons complex there. There has always been a deep irony at the heart Complex, buried on page 30, where the document of the nuclear weapons programs of the United discusses plans to press deteriorating facilities into States government. On the one hand, the weapons bomb-building service for a few more decades. are sold to the public as guarantors of “security;” The message to workers is two-fold. First: You their purpose is to keep us safe. On the other hand, aren’t worth the money it would take to make your the work of producing and testing the weapons— workplace safe. Second: Put on your hard hat and tens of thousands of them over the decades—has get to work. caused untold suffering, sickened workers, subjected To the rest of us, especially people living, work- innocent people to surreptitious and intentional ing and sending their kids to school in Oak Ridge, testing, using them as human guinea pigs, and con- who will be catastrophically affected if a design- taminated soil and water with radioactive and other basis earthquake strikes Bear Creek Valley and toxic materials that will endure and threaten wildlife enriched uranium is dispersed in the atmosphere and humans alike for millions and even billions of during the collapse of buildings, the message is also years. straight-forward: Don’t say we didn’t warn you! For the first forty years of the nucle- A Long Time Coming ar age, the government flat-out denied the negative effects of nuclear weapons The confession that Y-12 will con- production. But by the middle of the tinue to operate in unsafe buildings is not 1980’s reports of massive environmental exactly voluntary, nor was it part of the contamination were beginning to filter long-term plan when Y-12 conducted its If we are to out of the bomb plants; by the late 1990’s Site-Wide EIS in 2011. At that time, the challenge this the government was establishing a medi- plan was to shut down aging production cal compensation program for workers facilities, including Building 9212, Build- decision, we will sickened by their work at bombs plants ing 9202-2E, and Building 9215. These need the power or in uranium mines—it has paid out would be replaced by a new, state-of-the- billions—and just last year, the victims of art bomb production facility, the Uranium of “crowd- US nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands Processing Facility, designed to current source” fund- brought legal action against the US and seismic standards. other nuclear armed nations in federal But when the cost of the UPF soared ing—everyone court in California and at the International Court of to more than 19 billlion dollars (from an original chipping in a Justice in The Hague, Netherlands. estimate of $1.5 billion) and the construction sched- ule disappeared into infinity, and the initial design little or a lot, Safety Schmafety effort collapsed after wasting half a billion dollars, above and be- “With regard to seismic hazards, it would be the UPF plan was scrapped, and with it the plan to prohibitively expensive to upgrade 50+ year-old make Y-12 as safe as it could be. yond our usual facilities to current seismic standards. As such, the The new plan is a radical change. The UPF is giving, to raise plan is not to bring the long-range Y-12 Enriched now five buildings, only one of which is being built Uranium facilities to current seismic standards, but to maximum seismic standards. And instead of the required to improve worker safety and reduce mission risk.” putting all enriched uranium operations in the new funds. The remarkable admission comes in the Supple- buildings, two of the deterioriating old buildings, ment Analysis for the Site-Wide Environmental Im- 9202-2E and 9215, will be pressed into service for at pact Statement (EIS) for the Y-12 National Security least twenty more years, probably longer. OREPA News ||| 2 ||| June 2016 The change in plans required the government to review its Site-Wide EIS to determine whether it still fit the new plan. OREPA filed a Freedom of Informa- tion Act request for that review, called a Supplement Analysis, in March of 2015. Now what? It was finally made public in April 2016. The NNSA’s report stands unless it is Green light for the bomb plant challenged in court. We were disappointed but not surprised at the findings of the Supplement The weaknesses in the report are Analysis. NNSA declares, despite the fact that its plan will now be using unsafe obvious. NNSA is simply hoping we can- buildings, that nothing significant has changed from the old plan, so they do not have to prepare a new Site-Wide EIS. They are green-lighting the UPF bomb not afford to sue them to compel them to plant. prepare a full Site-Wide Environmental It’s not just that they don’t want to spend the money to make the old build- Impact Statement. ings safe, it’s that they can not do it at any cost—the foundations of the building A challenge will be expensive, cost- do not meet current seismic standards and, according to the Defense Nuclear ing at least $25,000, money which we Facilities Safety Board, can not be brought up to code. do not currently have in our bare-bones The admission that the old facilities will not meet seismic standards is only the tip of the iceberg. The analysis also downplays other earthquake data budget. Most years, OREPA works hard that has come to light since 2011, declaring the 2011 data “remains valid and to raise the funds to break even. If we are relevant and is not repeated in this SA.” NNSA says new information does not to challenge this decision, we will need change site-specific data at Y-12—but it is wrong. the power of “crowd-source” funding— Both significant new pieces of information—the US Geological Survey everyone chipping in a little or a lot, issued new maps in their 2014 report that found the increase in the seismic above and beyond our usual giving, to risk in the East Tennessee Seismic Zone (which includes Y-12) to be the second highest in the country, and researchers at the University of Tennessee found raise the required funds. the area has experienced higher than previously believed earthquakes, in excess We do not have a firm timeline for of 6.0 magnitude—should result in more stringent requirements for radiologi- filing papers, but the clock is ticking. At cal facilities or, at the very least, require a detailed assessment of the impact of some point, the courts will consider the larger, more likely earthquakes than were contemplated in 2011. NNSA finding a done deal and reject a It’s all modernization challenge, so there is some urgency. We The original UPF plan was ambitious; it set out a path to modernize the en- are working with a legal team now to de- tire Y-12 complex by consolidating all operations in one big facility. But the cost velop the motions required, but we can’t and schedule proved to be too much for the Department of Energy to defend, so move forward without funding. the plan changed, and changed again, and finally resulted in the new plan. You can send contributions to And now it’s not just about the UPF, though that remains the cornerstone of the modernization plan. What happens to the rest of the Y-12 complex is also OREPA at P O Box 5743, Oak Ridge, different than envisioned in 2011—significantly different, according to Con- TN 37831 or donate through our website gressman Chuck Fleischmann, who said the UPF “is on a completely different at www.orepa.org (We use paypal, but approach than the original strategy.” you don’t have to have a paypal account, It is that difference that requires NNSA to prepare, at the least, a Supple- any credit card should work.). mental Site-Wide EIS. OREPA believes, in fact, that an entirely new Site-Wide EIS is called for. + OREPA News ||| 3 ||| June 2016 OREPA joins colleagues in Washington T he government’s plan to spend four million dollars an hour, every hour for the next thirty years, to build new bomb plants, upgrade and modify nuclear war- heads, and build missiles, submarines and jets to deliver them around the globe was the subject of the week when six OREPA members joined more than fifty other activists from around the country in Washington, DC in April as part of the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability’s DC Days.